First, the fact that such an amateurish, if enthusiastic, operation would never be able to find its feet nowadays. I am more familiar with the history of the Citadel Miniatures side of the story, so it was interesting to see how the London based board games side of the business developed the brand that eventually became the miniatures oriented company that GW now is. Great run through of a company close to my heart, mostly covering a time period before I was a gamer myself, and told with some excellent humour from life starting to build the brand we know today.

An enjoyable trip down memory lane, full of nostalgic photos and details I was only dimly aware of as a nascent gamer in the 80's.You haven’t given any thought to finding anyone who could succeed him, and he knows that too, and your plan for how to keep him on side when he resigns the third time is to promise you’ll let him run the company, which is what he wanted to begin with. Less of a history book and more of a coffee table tome, Dice Men manages to do something quite remarkable in under 300 pages: tell a surprisingly deep story, rich with captivating imagery, without ever seeming verbose or vain. The first sets the pattern, as he resigns from Citadel and is replaced for a few months before he’s asked back, with significant assurances about allocation of resources i.

Yet despite marvelling at the most excellent tome, it’s sat (pride of place) on my bookshelf unread, daunted by the task ahead of me. words (not that having pictures is a bad thing) and how much I get through when I sit down to read it. They’re not of the right social class for it, but the phrase that keeps coming back to me to describe the two remaining Dice Men is “gentleman amateurs.

I have to mention that another review here comments on the disappointingly "flat" writing style, which baffles me. From the launch of Dungeons and Dragons from the back of a van, to creating the Fighting Fantasy series, co-founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson tell their remarkable story for the first time. There are lots of pictures and topics covered such as Citadel Miniatures and the start of Warhammer which I’ve never read before. This third song is the same as the first, but the reward for Bryan is even more dramatic; he first becomes part of a joint operating board, then group managing director. Probably so too would its founders, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (and the oft-forgotten John Peake, though he plays a fifth-Beatle role in this story, departing the stage very early).

And all that stuff about those fighting fantasy books - really want to revisit Firetop Mountain too now as well. Dealing with the negatives first, Dice Men is surprisingly flatly written given Ian Livingstone's strong credentials as a fantasy author. Ultimately it’s hard to escape the idea that they just didn’t want it that much, and Ansell really did. In a modern world with dozens of miniatures wargames and hundreds if not thousands of board games on the market, there’s a tendency to disdain the old family board game standards like Risk and Monopoly, but those are what get the Dice Men into gaming in a big way, along with the later discovery of Diplomacy and then historical wargames. This plan nearly ends in disaster with the famous video games crash in 1983-84, though that doesn’t stop GW from publishing its own small range of computer games later in the 80s.In the early days, the 1980-1990s, there was a subscription service where GW would send you a game a month, and it was heavenly. Pure nostalgia, although I suspect that if you aren't "of a certain age" where the names and games and atmosphere of this book are directly relevant to your life then you will find this less than exciting, and probably actually boring. I don’t think this will have particularly wide appeal, but then I’m also not sure it was really intended to.

What amazes me is how many of the personalities involved in GW’ sphere of influence either came from, or moved onto, other projects and companies which I also love. Some of that just isn’t in the scope of this book; Livingstone’s last link with GW is severed in 1991, before even the second edition of 40k, let alone such far-off ventures as GW becoming truly multinational or the Lord of the Rings licence or Age of Sigmar or any of that. This is also a business environment alien to the modern age with no e-mail or IMs; for most of the time Ansell in Nottingham is going to be running things independently from Livingstone and Jackson in London and so by necessity he is going to be out of sight – and probably out of mind – for long stretches. In the backwards view of history this newsletter is adorable in its naivete; it’s suggestive of a group of enthusiasts getting in miles over their heads playing at running a company which will be lucky to survive its first year, never mind eventually grow into a multinational. Despite being one of the minds behind Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Bryan Ansell comes out of this history looking pretty mercenary.

You have a significant subsidiary helmed by a bloke who has already resigned twice in the last four years to force your hand in giving him more power, after telling you the reason he quit the last company he founded was because his co-owners lacked his vision and ambition. Initially, it was a distributor for the role-playing games from the US, principally Dungeons and Dragons and Runequest. This story is full of fascinating facts about lesser known games from the early days of the company, as well as the origins of the ones everyone knows, and Livingstone has a gift for making the story flow engagingly and engrossingly throughout.